David Oppenheimer

David Oppenheimer from St Edwards School in Oxford spent 5 weeks on his bursary placement at CEH Wallingford and Wallingford Hydrosolutions. His project was supervised by Andy Young and was titled 'The use of fine resolution hydrological data in improving the estimation of generation potential for run-of-river hydropower schemes'.

David Oppenheimer from St Edwards School in Oxford spent 5 weeks on his bursary placement at CEH Wallingford and Wallingford Hydrosolutions. His project was supervised by Andy Young and was titled 'The use of fine resolution hydrological data in improving the estimation of generation potential for run-of-river hydropower schemes'.

The aims of the project

To compare and contrast daily and sub-daily data, to see if there is a big difference. If so, then engineers creating water schemes should be using sub-daily instead of daily.

How the project was carried out

Flow duration graphs were drawn (percentile excedence of flow data vs flow) of daily and sub-daily data for different catchments across the UK. Having analysed the graphs, further research was carried out into other patterns using other statistical graphs i.e. coefficient of variations vs flow.

The conclusions reached at the end of the project

On the whole for most streams and rivers sub-daily data and daily data is exactly the same except sub-daily data will have more variations/extremes in the high and low flows. The coefficient of variation graphs show this as there are no variations in differences between sub-daily and daily data except at high flows.

The most valuable thing about the bursary experience

I found that small things can have massive impacts in the bigger picture. I had no idea that there was such depth in hydrology and such statistical and mathematical models would be used and be helpful in the real world.